Imitation and Adaptation: A Meeting of Minds

Abstract

The focus of this collaborative paper is a form of creative collaboration: translations and adaptations across distinct historical periods and cultural contexts. The paper draws upon Edward H. Friedman's experience as an adaptor and translator, and both participants' research and scholarly work. The paper focuses on the choices made by adaptors in considering the time, place and contexts of the original while bearing in mind the exigencies and the sensibilities of the present. There is no doubt that the practice of imitatio in the Early Modern period and current practices of spin-offs and remakes differ significantly; however, this project reflects upon what Early Modernists can learn from the contemporary adaptations and stagings of the texts we study and teach. This question was central to Emilie Bergmann’s recent cross-cultural seminar on Renaissance and Baroque imitatio and centuries of translations and adaptations into French prose and theatre (Lesage and Molière) and Italian opera (Don Giovanni) in the eighteenth century, and recent English and Spanish spin-offs. The participants' specific focus is on Friedman's own adaptations of Lope de Vega's La dama boba, Unamuno's Niebla and Cervantes' Don Quijote and El laberinto de amor, in dialogue with other recent adaptations of Spanish comedia: the Royal Shakespeare Company's version of Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa, Octavio Solís' Dreamlandia and Man of the Flesh (versions, respectively, of La vida es sueño and El burlador de Sevilla).